Alabama

What our readers are saying: Term limits and Hispanic voters

Term limits will not solve all our problems in Montgomery and Washington, but it will make a positive difference. As things stand now raising campaign funds, pleasing a few special interest and getting re-elected are most politicians main focus. The solution to many of our problems are not rocket science.

The writer of the letter “Voter fraud exists” in Sunday’s The News shows exactly why the drive for photo IDs for voting to prevent fraud is wrong headed.

The writer notes that there was an increase of Hispanics registered to vote between 2008 and 2012 of 2 million and then offers the question: “Does anyone believe that 2 million more Hispanics got U.S. citizenship in the four intervening years?” Implying this somehow must be fraud.

But the writer’s angst is based on a false assumption: Newly registered voters don’t come only from new citizens. In fact, newly registered voters come from the entire population. For the Hispanic population, that was more than 53 million people in 2012, according to the Census Bureau. If you assume only adults (about 35 million) you have an increase in voter registration of the whole population of only about 6 percent. Considering that there was great effort to register Hispanic voters, this is not an unbelievable gain and certainly does not point to fraud. Rather it points to good citizenship. We all should be registered to vote and then we should make the effort.

That almost three-quarters of Hispanic voters chose Barack Obama perhaps says more about the Republican Party and its refusal to even consider immigration reform and other issues important to them than it does about voter fraud. What seems evident is that Republicans rather than coming up with policies more attractive to the Hispanic community to gain its vote, are trying instead to eliminate that vote through the bogus argument of voter fraud and the need for photo IDs.

The only fraud we see working here is the difference between what those promoting photo ID for voting say and what their real intentions are.

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